From Chapter 1 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty:
“Economics has long stressed the ‘division of labour’ which such a situation involves. But it has laid much less stress on the fragmentation of knowledge, on the fact that each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge possessed by all, and that each is therefore ignorant of most of the facts on which the working of society rests. Yet it is the utilization of much more knowledge than anyone can possess, and therefore the fact that each moves within a coherent structure most of whose determinants are unknown to him, that constitutes the distinctive feature of all advanced civilizations.
In civilized society it is indeed not so much the greater knowledge that the individual can acquire, as the greater benefit he receives from the knowledge possessed by others, which is the cause of his ability to pursue an infinitely wider range of ends than merely the satisfaction of his most pressing physical needs. Indeed, a ‘civilized’ individual may be very ignorant, more ignorant than many a savage, and yet greatly benefit from the civilization in which he lives.”
Somewhere in Constitution of Liberty, Hayek apocryphally quotes an anthropologist that it would be more accurate to say that we are a product of culture than the other way around. It’s strange to think about how many decisions we make throughout the day make use of knowledge and experience of someone other than our own, or the knowledge and experience of generations of unknown people who have, by pursuing their own ends, paved the way for our use of their accumulated knowledge. In turn, our daily actions, plans, expectations, are building and transforming knowledge and culture that some future unknown individual will make use of. The future is not merely unknown, but unknowable.
